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Throughout my career I have focused exclusively on creating software. Software is an interesting trade in which your raw materials, bits, are nearly limitless and recyclable compared to carpentry’s used of wood. The barrier to entry for tools that software developers can use to turn their virtual creations into real physical objects is plummeting dramatically. Virtual Reality eye ware, 3D printing, Laser cutting, modular microcontrollers are all becoming simple to use, so simple in fact, that I was able to develop my first physical project: A portable gaming keyboard.

Back when I was working in the tech shop in CompUSA I came up with a good analogy for explaining the differences between RAM and Hard Drives to people who didn’t understand what they were looking at in computer specs.

Imagine you have a desk with a drawer. Now you have various things in the drawer of the desk, say taking notes in a notebook, a todo list, an appointment book, a sketchbook. To be able to work on any one of those items you need to take them out of the drawer and place them on the desk, not overlapping anything and not hanging off the edge. If you have a really small desktop surface, you might be only able to fit your notebook and todo list on it at one time. If you wanted to sketch on your sketch book, you first have to put your notebook back into the drawer then take the sketch book out and put it on the surface.

The surface of the desk represents RAM and the drawers represent hard drives. If you want to be able to work one more things at once quicker, having a larger desk surface would let you have more items on it so you can switch between tasks quicker. Lets also say, your are running out of space in your drawer, you can get a 2nd drawer to add to the desk to fit more things in.

Probably not useful to anyone who is reading this, but maybe it can making explaining tech specs to some one less technical a bit easier.

I recently decided to give the beta of Flash Builder 4.7 a try, and found a project I have been working on deciding not to compile. All kinds of warnings (100+) showed up in my problems panel. My project relies on a shared project, and for some reason some core files like BitmapAsset and ByteArrayAsset weren’t found.

Class mx.core::BitmapAsset could not be found.

Most google searches only turned up fixes involving the compiler flags ala:

mxmlc -static-link-runtime-shared-libraries=true

This did not fix my problem, what ultimately did though was going to my shared library’s properties, Library Path tab, and setting the combo box in the picture below to Merged into code.

This ended up clearing most errors, a few still remained but weren’t problem. It turns out that HAXE compiled swcs are causing warning to show up relating to missing: getClass.T and Null.t
These omissions don’t seem to be affecting my ability to compile, but that is probably due to the fact that I’m not using the NAPE library which depends on a HAXE compiled swc.

Replace the video’s dialog:
Truck: “Calling all game engineers, calling all game engineers engineers that we are holding interviews for positions in Los Angeles, California.”
Me: ” I’ve got a degree in Computer Information Systems.”

My degree never broke into Big O notation or anything fun, it ended up being much more high level and less mathy (which bothered me).

Overall I think the interview was positive, though I was definitely caught off guard by their programming questions. I feel that me getting a the job could be 50/50, lets just hope that its just me thinking about it too much.

So reddit has a blind person ‘Ask Me Anything’ and I remembered that iOS devices actually have pretty good support for blind people, so I decided to make a ‘quick, one-take, off the cuff’ video of me attempting to demonstrate it for him (and his sister to describe to him) as well as inform other redditors. Here it is:

Here’s a quick post. I’ve been working on my portfolio and wanted to use HTML5 video, since overall support is pretty good these days. Its a bit crazy, but you do need to have a few different formats for all browsers, desktop and mobile, to play nicely but was worth it for me. I ran across the VideoJS library and its seemed well maintained and a great solution. It worked like a charm initially, but in browser testing I noticed that it had an issue when full screening on firefox and chrome. Take a look:Read more »

Every time I start working on a project where I end up using xml and flash, it usually seems pretty straight forward. I usually bounce between sephiroth and kirupa for getting my bearings. Initially it all ends up feeling fine, especially when working with a perfectly constructed test xml file.

It’s only when you attempt to parse an established XML type, such as RSS, where you feel the snags of dealing with XML. At first its not clear why things are a problem, you are targeting the correct child nodes, not spelling anything wrong. Thats when you start to trace out the xml and the namespace nightmare becomes apparent. What is the extra stuff being appended to the nodes? How do I target these things?Read more »

Localizing any project is never fun to think about and usually not the ‘sexy’ part of a project. I’d like to introduce you my latest library: Babel Flash.

Babel Flash is a free AS3 library whose goal is to make localizing your flash projects easier. It handles loading external font swfs and replace graphics and text on the fly. Setting it up can both be done programmatically or in the IDE, so it’s both programmer and artist friendly.Read more »

Well in my first post I hinted that it was related to another tool that I was going to share.

Well here it is, this is my AS3 Sound Sequencer. This bit of script in conjuncture with Matt Przybylski’s Sound Manager allows you to string a few sounds together with optional delays between them and giving you the ability to pause or stop it at will.